More neighbour disputes

Due to the length of our back garden, we have some 15 neighbours backing onto our property. We get along just fine with 14 of them. Up until last year, we were happy with all 15.

Our next door neighbours moved in 1 year ago, They have been a major pain ever since. I touched on this issue a few weeks back.

Our current dispute is length of fence/hedge between us. Our neighbours basically want a low maintenance concrete garden. That's fine by me, but to achieve that, they don't want any of our plants encroaching our property. As you can maybe see from this photograph, the boundary post is pretty much smack in the middle of the hedge. I guess that at some point in the past, both sets of neighbours agreed to a boundary hedge instead of a fence (although there is a wire fence running through the hedge). Our neighbours want the hedge and all other plants anywhere near the boundary removed so that they can erect a new fence. We don't mind them building a new fence ... it will give us more privacy (there are some gaps in the hedge). However, as you can also see in this photograph, they already built a "temporary fence" earlier in the year. They now want to remove this temp fence and build a nice one in its place ... in so doing, they want to push out the boundary as much as they possibly can. They say they are not being spiteful, but that this is "necessary". I really don't think a few inches will make much of a difference. This shot was taken with an extreme wide angle lens, so the space is exaggerated. I think the gap is about 6 inches.

Previously, when they built the temp fence, they agreed to us bending back the hedge so that they could build their fence. Now they want the hedge removed. According to their builder, they have the right to remove the hedge completely if it is encroaching the boundary.

This is a perfectly good, extremely low maintenance, non-invasive hedge (cottoneaster). It seems very spiteful to me.

The neighbours do not have a single plant in their garden. They don't want any either/ Again, that's their choice, but it breaks my heart to think that this hedge (and several plants growing there), will soon be bulldozed into oblivion.

Again to stress the point, we are all in favour of them building a nice new fence, but we would like to preserve the existing hedge. That hedge is used by the birds in summer and winter. There are birds nesting in there at different times of the year. They don't care.

According to them, I am an "arsehole"

The only consolation for us is that once the fence is up, hopefully we will never see them again (except out the front of the property).